By: Robbie Whelan

Two seemingly unrelated news tidbits crossed my desk today. One is the unexpected report from the Commerce Department that nationally, home construction is up 22 percent. The AP reports that both housing starts and permit applications are higher than economists were predicting, largely due to an uptick in apartment construction.

The other bit of news comes from the agenda (.pdf) of Baltimore’s Board of Estimates, which is likely to approve a measure tomorrow (there are no protests filed on the item as of yet) to amend the city’s SCOPE program to make it easier for Realtors to market blighted houses in Baltimore.

The program, — which stands for Selling City Owned Properties Efficiently, and has been criticized for failing to do just that — pays agents from the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors an 8 percent commission to successfully sell city-owned vacants to buyers interested in rehabbing them.

This new measure would change the SCOPE program in variety of ways, including allowing homebuyers to make offers on multiple SCOPE properties using one contract of sale, giving the buyer 15 extra days to back out of the contract if inspection problems arise, and two measures that hardly strike me as “efficient”– one that gives the buyer 18 months after to purchase to establish occupancy in the house and one that “[increases the] amount of time to settle from 60 days to 90 days due to numerous extension requests of purchasers as the result of financing issues.”

Reading these two items, it struck me that as we climb out of the ruins of this recession, the home-building industry and local governments might be at odds as far as their main goals are concerned. There are 2,800 houses in Baltimore, for example, that will be left empty by foreclosure, and need to be sold and occupied to keep them from falling into disrepair and damaging their surrounding neighborhoods. There are 30,000 vacant properties that the city is trying to dispose of through its new Land Bank initiative, and anyone who has ever driven through Park Heights, Sandtown or Broadway East can tell you that they’re a big part of the ruin of many an urban neighborhood.

Why, then, is it a good thing to be building new houses? And should the city be encouraged by a jump in home construction, or worried that new housing stock will undermine their efforts to fill the glut that we already have?